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But if we are to consider only the present and may not call in
the past to make the total, why do we not reckon so in the case
of time itself, where, in fact, we do not hesitate to add the
past to the present and call the total greater? Why not suppose a
quantity of happiness equivalent to a quantity of time? This
would be no more than taking it lap by lap to correspond with
time-laps instead of choosing to consider it as an indivisible,
measurable only by the content of a given instant.
There is no absurdity in taking count of time which has ceased to
be: we are merely counting what is past and finished, as we might
count the dead: but to treat past happiness as actually existent
and as outweighing present happiness, that is an absurdity. For
Happiness must be an achieved and existent state, whereas any
time over and apart from the present is nonexistent: all progress
of time means the extinction of all the time that has been.
Hence time is aptly described as a mimic of eternity that seeks
to break up in its fragmentary flight the permanence of its
exemplar. Thus whatever time seizes and seals to itself of what
stands permanent in eternity is annihilated- saved only in so far
as in some degree it still belongs to eternity, but wholly
destroyed if it be unreservedly absorbed into time.
If Happiness demands the possession of the good of life, it
clearly has to do with the life of Authentic-Existence for that
life is the Best. Now the life of Authentic-Existence is
measurable not by time but by eternity; and eternity is not a
more or a less or a thing of any magnitude but is the
unchangeable, the indivisible, is timeless Being.
We must not muddle together Being and Non-Being, time and
eternity, not even everlasting time with the eternal; we cannot
make laps and stages of an absolute unity; all must be taken
together, wheresoever and howsoever we handle it; and it must be
taken at that, not even as an undivided block of time but as the
Life of Eternity, a stretch not made up of periods but completely
rounded, outside of all notion of time.
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